New Use for Your iPhone: Controlling Drones

MIT professor Missy Cummings used to fly F/A-18 Hornet fighters for the Navy. “I spent whole time complaining — who was the moron who designed this thing?” she recalled. If you’ve ever peeked inside a fighter cockpit, you’ll understand her gripe. Dials, displays and controls pack every nook and cranny. It’s the farthest thing from ergonomic.

The problem stuck with Cummings, after she got out of the Navy. She went on to get a Ph.D. in “cognitive systems engineering” before getting hired at MIT, where she heads the Humans and Automation Lab, or HAL. “There’s a joke in the name,” she pointed out.

Her crew of 30 grad students and undergrads is chasing a number of new ideas and technologies, all aimed at easing the sometimes unwieldy interactions between machines and their human masters. As an example, she refers to the complex, suitcase-sized controller that soldiers must haul around to control hand-thrown Raven unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. Cummings wants something simpler. And what could be simpler than an iPhone?

Actually, using an iPhone was her undergrads’ idea — because experimenting with it as a basis for a new robot controller meant she’d have to buy them all iPhones of their own. “We had the idea in June,” Cummings told Danger Room. “In six weeks, we went from the idea to a real flight test,” using MIT’s indoor robot range. (See video.) The total cost? $5,000 for a new, commercially available, quad-rotor robot — plus the cost of iPhones for her crew.

The iPhone bot controller is basically just an app, like any other. It relies on only the iPhone’s existing gear, and the phone can still be used for regular calls, web-browsing, texting, etc. HAL’s bot-wrangling app sends GPS coordinates to the robot, which navigates around using its own, built-in “sense-and-avoid” capabilities. Along the way, the bot can stream video or snapshots back to the iPhone.

“Our philosophy of control in my lab is humans should never do tele-operating,” Cummings said. In other words, no steering. “Our philosophy is that humans have important jobs they need to do, and should not worry about low-level housekeeping, telling a UAV to go from point to point. UAVs are smart, and can do that on their own these days.” The kind of (somewhat-detached) relationship she has in mind is called “supervisory control.”

Real-world uses abound. Not only would a iPhone-like controller make soldiers’ jobs much easier, it also opens up UAVs to a whole new, non-military market. If robot control is cheap and intuitive, people might find all kinds of new uses. Cummings’ own favorite: “Being able to launch one out of the window and fly it down to the Starbucks, to tell me how many people are in line, so I know when to get coffee.”